`Beet Queen` Is A 2d, Funnier Dose Of `Love Medicine`

August 31, 1986|By Reviewed by Barry Silesky. Editor of Another Chicago magazine

The Beet Queen

By Louise Erdrich

Henry Holt, 338 pages, $16.95

Louise Erdrich`s second novel is in many respects a continuation of the vision and method of her justly praised ``Love Medicine.``

Though only one or two of the first novel`s characters come in for cameo appearances and none of their stories go on, the geography, the lower-middle- class milieu, and the idiosyncratic characters on the backwash of American culture are familiar from her earlier work. Also the same is the method of separate, self-contained anecdotes related from the alternate points of view of the interrelated characters, instead of a conventional linear plot.

There are five main characters here, and the stories they tell span 40 years, beginning with the arrival in 1932 by boxcar hitch of brother and sister Mary and Karl Adare in a small town in eastern North Dakota and ending with a seriocomic finale at the town`s first sugar beet festival. From the novel`s opening chapters when Karl and Mary`s mother, Adelaide, herself abandoned, leaves her children to take off with an itinerant exhibition pilot, and Karl leaves Mary to get back on the train almost immediately after arriving, this is first and foremost a novel of victimization and survival.

Mary, the most prominent and most tenacious of the characters, insinuates herself into her aunt and uncle`s household and eventually takes over their butcher shop to provide a modest but adequate living for her and her lifelong friend, Celestine James. Brother Karl becomes a kind of archetypal traveling salesman who never seems to sell any of his constantly changing wares. He keeps reappearing unexpectedly and makes himself at home for indefinite periods, though he never contributes anything beyond his questionable salesman`s charm.

But cousin Sita, whose resentment of Mary for the latter`s success is lifelong, fares worst. Unlike the others, she aspires beyond her modest means, though she lacks the vision to realize what it takes to achieve her ambitions. The pretense and bitterness that remain finally isolate her completely, and the realization of these pitfalls and the fate they lead to are part of the moral center that unifies this novel.

In many respects ``Beet Queen`` feels a bit too much like a reprise of

``Love Medicine,`` and not much of an enlargement. In this, readers of the first who were waiting expectantly to see what new territory Erdrich`s clearly prodigious talent might uncover may be disappointed. But there is in the novel`s second half an abundant sense of humor, not much evident in the first novel, which gathers force, producing some outrageously funny scenes. When Wallace Pfef, town entrepreneur, Karl`s lover, and close friend of Celestine stages a birthday party for her daughter, Dot, the disorder that is inseparable from these lives takes over. Wallace has fed Mary spiked punch to try to modify her authoritarian tendencies, and when Mary goes to light the birthday cake, Wallace recounts the result: `` . . . in her mind`s disarray, she wound the cake stand so tightly that it sprung.

``I came back into the room as the cake began to move. The music box tinkled the birthday song, but quickly, so quickly that Mary`s mouth could not keep up with it. Speed built. The brown glaze blurred. The candles fused into a single flame and the toy bears began a mad chase that led nowhere.

`` `Stop!` I cried, lunging for the controls.

`` `HappyBirthdayToYou!` Mary cried.

``Then the cake stand`s spring snapped. It whipped around once, jerked, and flung the entire cake at Sita. She went backward with it, clutching thin air, fending off the bulk as if it were alive and attacking her. She flung bits of it from side to side and slapped her arms, thereby effectively demolishing what survived, mashing the rings of pineapple, beating the cake itself to crumbs.

``The little wheels of the bears` motorcycles spun themselves out against the wall. Sita`s high laugh rose above the sound of surprise. Louis leaped up, grabbed Sita, and held her pinned against his chest. The children combusted in a frenzy of pent nerves and Celestine had her hands full, calming them. As for Mary, she sat quite still. A statue couldn`t have been more motionless. A gaunt and Halloweenish grin was plastered to her face. Her eyes had gone a full black, and her hands were pressed together on her heart.``

But after the children are sent home, the party in ruins, Dot screams,

``That was the best birthday party ever!``

Such incidents bring the novel to the brink of farce, arguably tipping well over into it, but at the same time the image of the cake exploding and the birthday girl`s genuine delight amid the confusion stand as synecdoche for the novel--the lives of all its characters in a disarray which they are continually trying to assemble, and their very persistence at that task the measure of their success. Wallace wanted desperately to provide Dot with a happy birthday party, and in the very mess that came of his efforts he was successful.

So also, after the very black humor of the novel`s disastrous final incident, Dot, the spoiled darling of them all, now an adolescent heralding the next generation, the continuing of the tribe, gives us appropriately the final image. She is at home with her mother in the evening during a drought:

``Low at first, ticking faintly against the leaves, then steadier, strong on the roof, rattling in the gutters, the wind comes. It flows through the screens, slams doors, fills the curtains like sails, floods the dark house with the smell of dirt and water, the smell of rain.

``I breathe it in, and I think of her lying in the next room, her covers thrown back too, eyes wide open, waiting.``

The affirmation of rain may seem a little heavy-handed, but Erdrich`s novel has convinced us detail by detail, making us feel genuine affection for its odd, difficult, so human characters.